Friday, 14 December 2018

Not Dreaming of a White Christmas


The barber shook my hand this morning. He’s not in the habit of being formally expressive, so I’m guessing he was trying to thank me for my custom and convey season’s greetings – though he didn’t say either of those things; he knows by now that I would probably respond “Bah! Humbug!” so he just said, “All the best.” That was my last haircut before we fly – in a few days’ time – to Crete, where we will take shelter from the excesses of the forthcoming period of frenetic over-indulgence, aka the ‘festive season’. My personal Christmas Card Fairy has taken care of postal communications, while I have been busy with preparations for the trip. All that remains is for me to buy a wad of Euros because Cretans, I hear, prefer cash to credit. This is not a problem, but I wish I had moved sooner: the Brexit cliff-hanger being acted out in Parliament currently is having a very negative effect on the value of Sterling and each day that passes records a further slump in its value. My hope is that our Brexit-crazed parliamentarians will coalesce in some sort of agreement and that the miserable pound will recover from the wounds they have inflicted upon it before we get to the airport.
Meanwhile, life goes on in a compressed “must-do-it-before-Christmas” kind of way. There is a schedule of hook-ups with friends whom we will not see for a while (including a day-trip to London to catch a transiting Aussie), an outing of the Heaton Moor Jazz Appreciation Society to a live performance inspired by Benny Goodman’s music and a couple of cinema visits. As I write, some of these events are yet to come, but those that have occurred include a couple of socials and the cinema outings. The social events have been intimate foursomes of the kind that do not involve an exchange of gifts but are lightly tinged with tinsel on account of the incidental proximity of revellers in Christmas jumpers and soundtracks of tediously regurgitated yuletide musak.
There was no hint of Christmas at the cinema, however. First, we saw The Old Man and The Gun, a film that surely must be Robert Redford’s swansong. If so, his acting career is now bookended by portrayals of two loveable rogues – the Sundance Kid and the Old Man – both of whom were engaged in the business of bank robbery. Now, although Hollywood has presented it as an entertaining caper, robbery is condemned, not condoned, by upstanding citizens and punished by strict laws pertaining to ownership of property. However, I think this view has probably softened in the years since 2008, when the bankers themselves pulled off the biggest robbery of all time, leaving us with a legacy of civic penury, an abiding sense of injustice and a heightened awareness of the rapacity of corporations. Let’s hear it for bank robbers! Well, all right, that film is a light-hearted entertainment, but the other one we saw – Disobedience – certainly is not. It tells of the repercussions consequent upon an individual’s refusal to conform to the strict rules and conventions of the society into which they were born. On one level it is a love-story with complications; on another, it is a contemplation of entropy, the tendency of a closed system to descend into chaos – somewhat like the Brexit negotiations.
Disobedience came to mind the next day when I was heading for the loo in a department store. I passed a grey-haired couple and overheard her say to him “Don’t you move from there!” as she walked away. He didn’t. When I came back that way he was still standing, forlorn in the Ladies’ Shoes Department, with the strains of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas having no obvious cheering effect upon him.


No comments:

Post a Comment